Ruffian sucked in a breath. “Truly?”
“Aye.” Fie braced for a scolding like the ones Little Witness and Drudge had handed her.
Instead Jade’s hand thrust into her line of sight, filled with teeth. “Now that’s a grand thing. Can’t say I hate having a prince owe us a favor.”
“No wonder the queen’s proper crossed,” Ruffian chuckled, passing another fistful of teeth to Fie. “Good for you, giving her throne a rattle. Wager it won’t be the last time you do.”
“Thanks.” Fie reached for her own bag to stow the teeth—and remembered where it had gone. There was a small pouch for her flint at her belt. She stuffed the teeth into that, feeling all the more humbled for how readily Ruffian and Jade had handed them off.
Jade wound her hair into a knot with a twist of rag and nodded to Ruffian and Fie. “Ready?” At their ayes, she twisted about to cry to her band, “Masks on!”
“Masks on,” Fie echoed, as did Ruffian. Leather and wooden struts creaked about them in a grim ballad.
“Chief.” Lakima caught her as she fetched their chalk from the wagon. Her voice lowered. “The civilians are bound to ask—can any of it be saved?”
Fie looked to the fields and found townspeople staring, bleak, at their homes about to go up in smoke. She’d seen loss before, loss and guilt and rage in a sinner’s family, but this was different.
This was familiar.
She’d left Pa behind. She’d lost the only teeth to ever make her feel truly dangerous. Even before then, she’d split from her kin, from her roads, from her ways, all for the sake of the oath.
This time, she knew what it was to lose nigh everything that made you safe.
Yet all Fie could do was shake her head. “It’s reached the walls. Everything has to burn.”
“Maybe they’ll remember this when they pick the next arbiter,” Khoda said, bitter.
“More likely one’s assigned.” Wretch’s voice turned muffled as she strapped on her mask. “Town’s under a thousand, aye? The governor of the region picks the arbiters for them when they’re that small.”
So the townspeople had had no say in the arbiter with a hundred deaths on his head.
And so Fie said to the corporal, “If it helps the townsfolk, tell them when they see the smoke, it’s the pyres for their kin. That’s when they ought to pray. And if that doesn’t help … tell them the arbiter burns, too.”
She pulled her own mask on, the world dimming to a welcome relief of darkness and a beak full of wild mint. For the briefest of moments, she shut her eyes.
The weight of teeth round her neck and at her belt, the weight of her swords, the faith of her Crows, the respect of two stranger chiefs—they all meant something, if she let them. They all could steady her, if she let them.
No matter what Little Witness said, no matter how Drudge had treated her, she was one of them.
She was a chief, with a harvest of ash beckoning.
Fie let the mint flood her lungs, then strode toward the gates.
They’d been barred from the outside, but at first, even with the bar lifted, the gates refused to budge no matter how Varlet and Bawd pushed. Then Jade shook her head with rue and said, “Eater of Bones, this’s bound to be a rough day. Try giving it a pull.”
Jade was right. The gates swung open with only a little fight when the twins dragged on them, and Fie saw straight away what the older chief meant.
Three bodies lay beneath a shroud of dead bloodflies on the threshold, where they’d collapsed trying to get out. The gates had jammed on them.
“Steady,” Jade whispered, and patted Fie’s shoulder. “Hand out your chalk.” Her voice rose. “My band, start with the western houses.”
“My band, we go north,” Ruffian called, and shoved the arbiter none too gently over the dead at Karostei’s doorstep. Half the bloodflies rose from the corpses with an irate, sluggish buzz. The others rained off in stiff curls, legs folded up in surrender to the plague. “I’ll follow once I’ve dealt with … this.”
“We’ll take east, then.” Fie passed out the chalk to her band. “Suppose you all did this with Pa before?”
“Pair up, leave a ring for dead or empty, a cross mark for mercy,” Wretch said. The others nodded.
“Then I’ll follow. Once every house is marked, gather by…” Fie took a look around the town commons, trying not to grimace at the sight. Dead goats and dogs lay in misshapen heaps, rats huddled like graying warts on the hide of dusty ground already speckled with more fallen bloodflies. Sickly rot wept from nigh every foundation she saw. The market stalls looked about two days gone, canopy stands tilting or buckled in twain where gray ate through the wood and canvas.
The broad stone ring of a communal well in the middle of the open grounds seemed to be the only thing untouched by plague, though Fie wouldn’t put odds on its water in the next decade. At least it served as a landmark. “… There. That well. Let’s be on with it, then.”
Surprisingly, Varlet and Bawd split up, Bawd hanging back while Varlet linked his arm through Madcap’s and strolled toward a house. “You need company, chief,” Bawd informed her. “Can’t have you getting jumped in one of these houses. The whole thing’d be like to come down. Besides, I’ll not listen to my brother make an ass of himself flirting with Madcap.”
“So it’s mercy of a different kind,” Fie allowed. Normally she dealt mercy alone, as Pa had done, but today … today she reckoned she’d be better for company. “No use waiting until someone marks a door for me. Let’s clear houses until I’m called.”
Bawd followed her down the nearest street, stepping over slicks of gray mire and the remains of barrels that had bloated and burst, spilling apples, salt pork, pickle brine, and aught else into the street. The first house Fie went into reeked even worse of the plague, the humid air seeping through her cloak and gumming the crowsilk against her skin.
A Hawk crest had been carved into the wall, and beneath it several spears listed in a crumbling rack. Cold ashes sat in a small central fire pit, and a long table had sagged and collapsed, shards of broken porcelain strewn among molding beans. A set of steep stairs led up to what looked to be a loft; below them huddled two forms beneath a gray-stained blanket, unmoving.
“Check upstairs, will you?” Fie asked. Bawd loped the steps two at a time, while Fie gingerly pulled back the blanket. If she had to guess, this had been the home of the sergeant, who accounted for one of the bodies before her. She couldn’t tell who had been who, arms twined about each other to the last, only that they looked to be long past breathing. A quick press of her finger to each of their teeth confirmed it. Sparks from a living person’s teeth would nigh roar in her bones, but these teeth barely sighed at her touch.
Something about the dead Hawk coiled with a dead lover made her furious.
Something about it made her think of Tavin.
Fie stood, breath coming quicker in a warm, sickly rush of mint. For a long moment she wished she’d stuck around to watch Ruffian cut the arbiter’s throat.
“Chief.”
Fie looked up to see Bawd floating down the stairs with a fine-woven red robe laid over her crowsilk cloak, twirling an ornate parasol.
“I’m the prettiest girl at the dance,” Bawd cooed as she draped her dainty self against the wall. It didn’t hold, crumbling round her elbow in a small shower of rotting wood. “Oops.”
Fie couldn’t help but snort. “I don’t know that red’s your color.”
“Right you are.” Bawd hung the robe off a tilting spear. “Always did fancy that Gull blue, though.”
Fie marked a ring on the door with her chalk. “Rather think you fancied just the trousers. No one else in the loft?”
“Not a soul.”
“Then let’s be off.” Fie glanced back, then shook her head, glad the mask hid her reluctant grin. “The parasol stays, Bawd.”
“You’re no fun,” Bawd grumbled. She stuck it in the spear rack, which promptly fell apart.
&nbs
p; They left the next house with less cheer, fresh blood on Fie’s hands this time. By then, near every house in sight had been marked with rings or cross marks of chalk.
Fie didn’t have to tally many of the cross marks to know she had more mercy to deal today than ever before. She’d known, really, since they’d said five-score people had been left to rot in Karostei. She’d just not let herself think on it too long.
Steady. She was a chief. She was a Crow. This was part of her road.
Fie shook blood off her blade and headed to the next door.
At the third house, Bawd’s jokes dried up when a thin, gurgling voice inside cried, “Mama?”
At the fifth house, Fie handed her mask off to Bawd, too belly-sick for even the mint to help.
By the seventh, she’d stopped cleaning the Hawk sword afterward.
By the thirteenth, she’d no use for a mask anyway; the smell of blood had overrun the stench of the plague.
The rest of her band were waiting for her, passing water skins about, when she finally trudged back to the well. Their masks hung loose, a grudging concession to the cruel noon sun, which had conquered even the dreadful reek of dead and sick. It was an odd comfort to see the three bodies at the gate had been laid out on a proper pyre in the middle of the commons. It was a colder comfort to see the Crane arbiter lying beside them.
Wretch took one look at Fie’s hands, near black with blood now, and hauled up water with one of the few pails still intact. No one spoke to her, only patted her back or squeezed her shoulder, a mercy Fie was all the more grateful to let someone else deal.
Ruffian returned as Fie was scrubbing up. “Smart, that. If the blood dries, your rags turn stiff enough to chafe. Now your mercy’s done, half your band will go through the houses again for aught that’ll serve for kindling, and the other half will pile that and firewood between each house. One or two ought to take flashburn and splash the walls and the heaps, help the fire spread fast when it catches.”
Wretch stood. “Aye, we can manage that, chief. Spell yourself a bit.”
Fie nodded, wordless. She felt like she might be sick.
Ruffian studied her a moment. “Mind if I rinse off, too?”
“Go ahead,” Fie said dully as her band split off. She pulled her arms out of the pail and let them drip pink water on the dirt. This hot out, they’d dry fast enough.
Ruffian sat on the edge of the well, letting his mask fall to the dirt, and splashed his rag-wrapped hands. “Always hard when the Eater of Bones takes her due, but most ash harvests aren’t this big,” he told her. He didn’t have Pa’s way of talking to her, as if she should be at study; instead he sounded like a merchant passing a fellow trader a warning of stormy seas. “Only once have I cut more throats in one go, and that was because most of the village caught the plague in the same day. You don’t want to know why.” Fie did, morbidly enough, but maybe not now. Ruffian continued, “This’s the most mercy you’ve dealt at once, aye?”
“Aye,” Fie said, trying not to think of the ones younger than she. The last thing they should’ve seen was a friendly face. By every damned dead god, she’d done her best to give them one, even with tears in her eyes.
“Most of us get night terrors after our first ash harvest,” Ruffian said. “They pass with time. Let others take your watch shift, try to keep yourself busy. You might get short with your band for no reason, or want to run off by yourself, but that’s…” His brow furrowed as he searched for words. “It’s like an asp bite, this. You don’t let the poison sit until you lose an arm. You bleed it out. If you can’t talk to anyone in your band, find a shrine and talk to the keeper, aye? We have them for a reason.”
Fie’s throat closed. She told herself her eyes were stinging from looking up against the sun.
“From here it’s easy, aye?” Ruffian shook his hands into the bloody water. For better or worse, his tone had tilted closer to Pa’s. “Just like any other pyre. Most of the fuel’s been built into these houses, these walls. All you have to do is make sure the sparks catch.”
A shadow fell over him, shorter for the noon sun—but something about it struck Fie as amiss. She and Ruffian twisted about for a better look.
The first thing Fie saw was red, from blood still bright and slick.
The second was that the daylight filtered through the figure. Mere holes where the eyes, the nose, the teeth belonged, as if it were no more than cut from canvas—
Not canvas. Skin.
And the third thing Fie realized, wholly too late, was that the warped face gaping at them had belonged to the Crane arbiter.
The arbiter’s boneless hands had already slid onto Ruffian, one on his scalp, one at his chin.
“NO—!” Fie reached for him, too late.
The hands wrenched sideways with a crack.
Ruffian didn’t move for a moment, still balanced on the well’s edge. Then he collapsed, toppling into the pail and hitting the commons ground with a thud. Red water spilled into the dirt about him.
The skin-ghast wobbled over Ruffian’s body.
Then its empty face turned toward Fie.
CHAPTER SIX
THE COVENANT SEES
Screams split the air, and not just Fie’s own. She scrambled to her feet, snatching up Tavin’s sword, and immediately forgot every single one of the combat lessons Lakima had given her over the last four weeks.
The ghast reached for her, its hollow arms drooping deceptively like limp ropes. Fie knew that lie firsthand: though they were naught but walking skin, the monsters had all the strength they’d had in life.
She slashed hastily through its elbows. The forearms fell to the dirt like a wealthy woman’s gloves. They wriggled yet toward Fie, dragging themselves on their fingers.
She scrambled back. More screams echoed through the streets. Bloodflies took to the air as one of the bodies on the nearby pyre convulsed, then a second, then a third. It looked as if the skin itself was bubbling and contorting until it split with a squelch. That was Fie’s final straw: she keeled over, vomiting.
“TO THE COMMONS!” she heard Jade shout. “ALL CROWS TO THE COMMONS!” The cry echoed back from Crow to Crow on the western side of Karostei.
Fie wiped her mouth. “All—” Her voice came out a harsh squeak.
The arbiter skin-ghast lurched toward her, the remains of its arms twisting into something like vines. Fie yelped and staggered back, only for the severed forearms to tangle about her ankles and send her crashing to the earth. When she twisted onto her back, she saw the ghast slithering toward her on its belly like an adder. She reached for her Phoenix teeth—and remembered she had but one left.
Gone.
She’d lost the one way to protect them from skin-ghasts.
Bawd’s shriek pierced through the air.
The ghast raised itself up at the boneless waist, lunging for Fie. With a furious scream, she lashed out, swinging the sword in a clumsy arc. It sheared through the ghast at the belly. Both halves flopped in the dust like a cast-off shirt and trousers. She drew the chief’s sword in her other hand, slashing wildly on her knees, until aught that was left of the ghast were bloody rags yet writhing about her. Fie seized the scraps by the sickening handful and hurled them into the well.
She stumbled to her feet, sucking in the dusty air, and bellowed, “ALL CROWS TO THE COMMONS!”
The order caught and spread, echoing back to her from her own Crows on the east side of town. So, too, did a terrible and familiar airy howl, one Fie knew all too well.
There were a great many things she hated about the skin-ghasts, but chief among them was how, when they moved swift enough, the wind whistled through their empty husks. As a chorus of those whistles swept across the commons, Fie finally kenned the enormity of what had come for them.
Karostei had at least a hundred dead on its hands. And if Fie was right, that meant a hundred skin-ghasts were stripping free of their bones at this very moment.
Crows poured from the streets, the slinkin
g forms of ghasts on their heels. The three new ghasts from the arbiter’s pyre swayed drunkenly toward Fie, but she had an easier time dispatching these, hacking them to pieces small enough to kick into the well.
Madcap reached her first, the jug of flashburn still swinging from their hand. “Out,” Fie wheezed, pointing the chief’s sword toward the closed gates, only to find that was a fool’s hope: ghasts were already massing before it in numbers Fie couldn’t cut through.
“New plan?” Madcap asked.
The lone Phoenix tooth on her string waited, patient, inevitable.
No. Fie wasn’t going to burn it here, not with the safety of Jasimir’s procession still days away. But they’d laid fuel and flashburn all about Karostei by now. Perhaps fire could still staunch the ghasts’ numbers.
“New plan.” Fie handed Madcap her Hawk sword, much to their surprise and delight, and fumbled for her flint instead as Varlet arrived with another three of her Crows. That left three yet beyond Fie’s sight.
“Where’s the closest tinder heap?” Fie asked the new arrivals.
Varlet shook his head. “No good, chief. They’re charging right through the firewood and scattering it. And…” He grimaced and pointed at the nearby pyre. “They’re leaving it too damp to light.”
Fie looked, saw what he meant, and wished she hadn’t. For most of the dead, their skin had been the only thing holding the decaying flesh and innards together. It would take more than a flint to light the wet mess of a pyre now.
She didn’t realize she’d reached for the Phoenix tooth until it was rolling between her fingers.
Then she saw Wretch stumble from an alleyway, Bawd’s arm slung over her shoulders. The younger woman was limping swift as she could on a foot bent at a gut-churning angle.
The gray, mottled arm of a skin-ghast coiled about Wretch’s ankles and yanked. She fell.
Fie screamed. Her last Phoenix tooth was singing through her bones before she even knew she’d called it.
The Faithless Hawk Page 7
